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| Einstein's Dreams,
Alan Lightman |
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| Books,
Matt Fresco,
05 February 2001 |
Rating: F5
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Is there is any book more deserving of UK publication than Alan Lightman's fabulous Einstein's Dreams? Never published over here it was a smash hit in the US where it achieved cult status and huge sales. This is a slim volume that will leave a massive impression on you. If you have never used an online bookseller such as Amazon.com then this is your reason to use it today. I am not kidding - go and buy this book. On second thought go and buy several copies as this book is simply screaming to be lent to your friends.
I was introduced to this novel by the noted master horologist (that's a watchmaker to you and me) Anthony 'How' Howarth who lent it to me on pain of death if I did not return it. I never did return it and he never returned my imitation Rolex. I don't regret losing the watch at all. I read the novel and immediately lent it to a friend who never returned it to me either. I am now on my third copy and as I write this review I am preparing to put this one in the post to a man I barely know in Eire.
When Saul Bellow said that 'people can lose their lives in libraries, they ought to be warned; I am certain he had this book in mind. Alan Lightman is not a novelist. He is a physics professor at MIT who had never written a novel before.
At ten minutes past six a young Albert Einstein realises that he can discard all his multi-various dreams on the nature of time. One has risen to prominence. One is compelling. But the patent clerk cannot dismiss the dreams. All of them are possible, any of them might exist, but not here. They could only exist in other worlds. Einstein's Dreams are enchanting and the book's mere 179 pages take us through a selection of alternate time. In each chapter time behaves differently to the way it works here. In one world people are faced with time flowing backwards, in another it slows with altitude so the people live on the mountains and only venture to the valleys in rushed adventures.
This is Bill Murray in Groundhog Day and this is Martin Amis' Times Arrow. But this is so much more subtle and beautiful than any other time travel novel I have ever read. It has a lightness of style and an exactness of language that makes it more valuable than a physics lesson and more profound than a novel ought to be capable of. Indeed Salman Rushdie has compared it to Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. It is at once intellectual and provocative. Rushdie sums up the mesmerising effect when he say 'quite frankly I have not been so excited by a novel, let alone a first novel for a very long time'.
Pantheon
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